Bruce LaBruce is a legend in the always-fashionable genres of horror films, gay porn, art, gonzo journalism, independent cinema, punk and academia. He is based in Canada but flocks frequently to Berlin, where he is a beloved figure for generations of art, underground and fashion folk. We cut apart the components of cool, discuss fascistic fashion and gay sperm’s magical ability to heal historical trauma. Read at your own risk.
Ana Finel Honigman: In your experience, is there something like a distinctive Berlin sexual style or unique porn aesthetic?
Bruce LaBruce: Berlin is the last great ficken’ city of the Western world. Capitalist whore cities like London and New York become less sexually stimulating the more they cater only to the new privileged class that is too preoccupied hoarding capital and real estate to be interested in sexual nirvana. Berlin still sanctions sexual experimentation and excess, and values quality of life over quantity of material assets. The Berlin sexual style is characterized by its bohemianism and hedonism. Its porn is rough, frank, and fearless.
AFH: Is Berlin too blasé about the expression of urges and interests considered antisocial elsewhere? Don't both creativity and arousal require a bit more friction?
BLB: Many people in New York and London exhaust themselves with the daily drudgery of making enough money to maintain a small, expensive apartment. They spend all their energy working at jobs that don't really interest them. In Berlin you can still live in a large, open apartment without having to kill yourself to pay the rent. For me, the greatest enemy of creativity and arousal is having to waste your time as a wage-slave.
AFH: I've noticed that Berliners like to turn tragic spaces or sites of real historic atrocity into gay sex clubs and then art spaces—the Boros bunker being the key example. What do you make of that? Is cum like cultural holy water? Can it cleanse a space of its oppressive ghosts?
BLB: Absolutely! The spunk of gay sex cleanses spaces that have witnessed atrocities and offers redemption in the form of ecstatic pleasure. Fuck the pain away!
AFH: What do you think of brands like Hugo Boss repeatedly (maybe sometimes inadvertently) evoking a fascistic aesthetic in their catwalk collections? Do you like that look?
BLB: As we all know, fashion and fascism are etymologically linked. There's something intrinsically fascist about the fashion mentality. Designers are dictators, and fashion models bereft of emotion march down the catwalks like an army of brainwashed storm-troopers. So Hugo Boss perhaps is just a bit more authentically fascist. Personally, in terms of political aesthetics, I prefer the old communist Chinese and Soviet styles. Fascism is a bit too narcissistic and campy.
AFH: What do you think of domestication of gay identity or gay relationships in general Western popular media?
BLB: I'm largely against it. Gays are becoming like domestic animals: well behaved, loyal to their masters, benign and dependent. It's like Joan Crawford used to say: "If you want the girl next door, go next door."
AFH: Do you consider your work "ironic"? How can porn be ironic?
BLB: I like to think my work is more paradoxical than ironic. Irony implies a kind of disdain for its subject, a way of looking down at something that you don't want to admit excites or intrigues you. I think there's room for all different sorts of porn, and I try to make it in a style that interests me. I try to combine unlikely genres, like porn and agit-prop or porn and gore. I like a lot of classic porn, and I try to carry on that tradition, but give it a modern twist. That produces a lot of paradoxical imagery sometimes, but it isn't ironic to me.
AFH: You were recently in an exhibition at Tape Modern, curated by Anna Erickson and Emilie Trice, dedicated to artists inspired by Warhol. How has Warhol inspired you?
BLB: I was? Oh gee, nobody tells me anything. Can you send me a link? I've always appreciated Warhol's super-sissy persona, and his blankness. I've been accused of being emotionally remote all my life, and of course it's because I was traumatized as a youth for being a curly redheaded nancy-boy smarty pants in the midst of a bunch of cretins and vulgarians in the rural environment I grew up in. My favourite part of the Warhol diaries is when he says, after his first cat’s died, "that's when I stopped caring". When you're a sissy in a hostile and cruel world, you throw up a lot of protective barriers and you don't let many people in. But you really have a lot of velvet rage, so you let it out in your art. That's what Warhol's films were all about, and it's his films that have inspired me the most. People forget that he virtually made porn, culminating in Viva! having sex with Louis Waldon in Blue Movie.
AFH: How does Warhol relate to Berlin?
BLB: To Brigid Berlin? They were best girlfriends! If you mean to the city of Berlin, he doesn't. He would have hated Berlin.
AFH: Who hates Berlin? Are we going to? Do you think that Berlin is loosing its gritty glamour and slowing shifting into any other glossy big city?
BLB: Yes, but it's happening pretty slowly. It's getting more expensive and there are two many Americans and Brits and Scandinavians throwing their money around and speaking their own languages and buying up property. I give Berlin ten years before they ruin it completely.
[Images: Bruce LaBruce was photographed in Berlin by Maxime Ballesteros]
